Year: 2015

Five Reasons Your Legal Department Needs an Enterprise App Today

Posted on April 7, 2015 by - Business Process Management

Enterprise Apps are the nimble, simple-to-create, and quick-to-deploy cousins of the traditional enterprise legal management system. If you have not yet turned to enterprise apps to help you manage your legal department operations, here are five reasons to why your department needs to take a second look.

1. You are under the gun to do more work, with fewer resources.

There isn’t a legal department today that isn’t faced with this contradictory set of mandates. You are under pressure to reduce your outside counsel spend, work leaner and more efficiently, and eke more productivity out of your in-house team. An enterprise legal app can help you do just this. By focusing on process, these apps can help you gain visibility into the way your department works, find ways to make the processes more efficient, and free your people up to do more valuable work. Showing how this can be done, Onit client ZS Associates won the ACC Value Challenge in part by their implementation of technology to automate workflows, in particular for contracts. Read more about how ZS Associates facilitated changes in order to better meet corporate growth objectives.

2. Critical processes are currently being managed primarily through email and network folders.

If you are struggling under the weight of managing critical workflows through traditional enterprise legal management or other database systems, you’ll know how difficult it is to have real visibility into the legal processes taking place throughout your organization. This can be the case even if your department uses an enterprise legal management system for the “big” stuff like matter and spend data. These antiquated systems, while still useful, open your department up to undue risk and frustration when it comes to mission-critical processes. In one example, Onit helped a Fortune 500 client identify no fewer than 72 processes, across six internal groups and ten external vendors, which were being managed the old fashioned way. The solution was a suite of 50 enterprise apps that have since helped to process 20,000+ transactions in a transparent, defensible, and efficient way. Here are five quick telltale signs a process is ripe for a change.

3.  Enterprise Apps can bring new life to your existing ELM system.

Traditional enterprise legal management systems function as systems-of-record, a place where end data is stored. The primary function of an Enterprise App is to add a layer of engagement onto a system-of-record to make the processes happening around the data easier to manage and track. A system of record is only as good as the data included. Without a clear process for capturing and sharing data, the records in a database can quickly get outdated and even provide incorrect information. Enterprise Apps provide an easy-to-use front-end for your internal users while pushing back relevant data to the system-of-record already in place, all without major infrastructure changes. Read more about filling in the gaps by adding engagement to your enterprise software.

4.  Enterprise Apps address the primary problem you face, as a GC.

The day-to-day support activities that take too much time and pull your in-house team away from meaningful involvement in strategic priorities is a major issue for general counsel. With Gartner asserting about enterprise legal management, “It’s no longer just about matter and spend management,” it is important that GCs also involve themselves in business processes. The individual steps and tasks within workflows such as contract review and approval are largely untracked and invisible, which results in a much slower completion rate and less accountability along the way. Enterprise Apps bring these workflows out of the dark, bring accountability and visibility to the entire workflow, and allow for a quicker response time. All of these benefits mean that your in-house team is spending less time chasing “where” they are in a workflow, and leaves them more time to do the highly-skilled work that they are trained to do.

5.  You need a process solution, FAST.

You’ve identified your department’s workflow Achilles heel, yet you are afraid to start the long process of implementation that typically occurs with a traditional enterprise legal management system. Understandably so! It can take months, even years of development, testing, and training to roll out an enterprise software solution. In addition, the failure rate for enterprise systems is high because by the time the software is implemented your needs will have changed. You don’t have endless piles of cash due to your mandate to save money. Therefore, you don’t want to spend said money only to have that technology solution fail after a long implementation process. By contrast, Enterprise Apps are simple-to-create and are iterative by nature so they will evolve to meet your changing business needs. You can configure an Onit App in just 30-60 minutes at a fraction of the price of traditional ELM systems. In our Fortune 500 example above, the average development time for the 50 Enterprise Apps Onit created was 19 days.

 

To learn more about Enterprise Legal Apps, contact Onit today.

Onit is proud of the relationships we’ve built and the process improvement we’ve achieved with our valued customers. However, don’t take our word for it, check out what our clients have to say about Onit Enterprise Apps.

Ten Things You Need to Know About Enterprise Apps and How They Relate to Enterprise Legal Management (ELM)

Posted on April 2, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

1. The landscape for in-house legal departments has fundamentally changed. General Counsel (GCs) must think outside of his/her department when it comes to managing the entire enterprise’s legal affairs. This shift has meant that visibility into risk and compliance issues handled across the company, and metrics around spending and productivity are essential to a GCs success. Enterprise Legal Management is a term that has evolved to define this greater need for aggregated information across disparate departments in order to make better company decisions. 

2.  Enterprise Legal Management is a class of technology that helps GCs navigate this new landscape. The aim of ELM technology is to organize and inform through data. This class of technology makes it easier for GCs to gain visibility into potential legal risk across the wider organization, moving away from the siloed approach of yesterday. This enables a more proactive approach to managing the enterprise’s legal affairs and mitigating risk wherever it exists. 

3.  Enterprise Apps are the nimble cousin of your existing Enterprise Legal Management system. While larger ELM systems can give you easier access to global data, these systems don’t necessarily address the collaboration required to harness and use that data to benefit the organization. Built from the ground-up, Enterprise Apps are simple-to-configure, and easy-to-deploy solutions that aim to address complex and everyday processes that require a high degree of collaboration between knowledge workers. 

4. Enterprise Apps can integrate with existing ELM systems. Although these Apps can replace larger systems of record, they are more often than not, a way to bridge the gap that exists in those larger systems. Do you have a gap in functionality in an existing enterprise system that requires collaborative workflow? An Enterprise App can be used to bridge that gap at a fraction of the cost, rather than having to reconfigure your existing system. 

5. Companies of any size can benefit from Enterprise Apps. In-house legal departments dealing with organizations of any size, from small businesses to multi-billion dollar global corporations, can benefit from Enterprise Apps.

6.  Enterprise Apps are a quick way to drive meaningful operational improvements. Unlike the development and implementation process for a large enterprise legal management system, which can take several months or years, the average time it takes our clients to implement an Onit App is 19 days. While the most complex implementations can take up to 90 days, this still beats the average for ELM systems by months. 

7.  Enterprise Apps can help your legal department transform the way it works. In one example, Onit partnered with a large Fortune 500 client to deploy an NDA App. The company’s in-house legal department dealt with over 10,000 NDAs annually, with the average time from start to finish taking over 16 days. Onit developed a prototype App to handle global submission, negotiation and electronic signature of NDAs. The result? The company processed over 1000 NDAs in the first month of deployment, with the completion time reduced to just 24 hours and 90% of the NDAs being processed without lawyer involvement. 

8.  Enterprise Apps are secure.  Like your larger Enterprise Legal Management system, your Enterprise App data is hosted in secure commercial data centers. In most cases, your data is more secure than if you hosted it in your environment. 

9.  Enterprise Apps require little or no IT involvement. In many cases, customers can configure, deploy, and support enterprise Apps with no corporate IT involvement. App developers, such as Onit, achieve a “low code” or no code development structure, which also speeds up the time to value for our clients.

10.  There is an Enterprise App for every need/process/workflow. Apps for very standard processes like contract review and approval, NDAs, alternative fee arrangements, and matter or legal spend management are available.. Alternatively, Apps can be created from scratch to meet a particular process or set of circumstances unique to your business.

When you are exploring enterprise legal management systems, it helps to have a technology partner who can walk you through the process of creating an effective solution that works for your department. Onit can help you determine your best course of action, and we’ll be there every step of the development process.

With a small investment of your time – typically 60 to 90 minutes – to help us understand your business process, we can configure an App. Contact us today!

A Simple Process Improvement Plan for Legal Departments

Posted on March 20, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Enterprise Legal Management

The business climate around us has changed, and in many cases, not for the better, with undue value placed on eking out more productivity (not the good kind), while spending less. For legal departments, this means a triple whammy of smaller budgets, fewer resources, and increasing workloads being brought back in-house. Businesses that best adapt to their changing climate will not only survive, but thrive. In the words of Charles Darwin, “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” One way to ensure your business continues to thrive is by engaging in strategic process improvement.

In a recent article by George Dunn and Wendy Hufford, both experts in process improvement, the authors lay out a simple 3-step process improvement plan for legal departments. Process improvement can be an overwhelming project with many teams stalling just out of the gate because of the truly daunting nature of change. The article does a great job of distilling change down to a few exercises so that you can start putting pen to paper when it comes to a much-needed change.

According to the authors, step one is to get acquainted with the various process methodologies out there. Everyone may be talking about process, but there are many different ways to approach it. The five methodologies noted by the authors are Continuous Process Improvement, Business Process Management, Re-engineering, LEAN, and Six Sigma. Sometimes, it takes a combination of methods to find the right fit for your organization. At Onit, our solutions employ a combination of business process management (BPM), which focuses on “innovation and flexibility through combining process and technology changes,” and the continuous process improvement methodology, which focuses on making small changes over time rather than one big overall change.

Next, you should identify the areas within your department that could use improvement. Anyone who’s worked on an in-house legal team will be familiar with the common departmental vulnerabilities outlined by the article. Onit Smart Process Apps aim to create efficiency in common tasks that typically cause a lot of backlog and frustration. Processes such as contract management and administration, records retention and storage, and email communication are ripe with unnecessary frustration due to lack of visibility, the tracking down of documents, approval delays, and exposure to risk. So, how can you tell if a process is ripe for change? Look out for these five signs.

At Onit, we offer Smart Process Apps to tame common processes such as contract review and approval, NDAs or alternative fee arrangements. Need a custom solution? Our nimble App Builder platform allows you to create a customized solution that can adapt to grow with your business. Onit’s overarching philosophy across all of our technology solutions is to provide a new level of visibility and transparency into processes to help knowledge workers involved in the process be more productive, happier and more successful.

The third and last step is to create a process improvement plan for your department. The article lays out some specific items to think about, consider, and finalize, in order to put that plan into place. One important item is to start creating a culture of change within your organization. One way to do this is to build a coalition of like-minded individuals united around one inefficient process area. Check out our blog post: “3 Steps to Creating a Solid Foundation for Your Change Initiative.”

Another big part of creating a plan is to prioritize potential process improvement initiatives and to audit current processes to find soft spots and opportunities. Need help conducting a process audit? We’ve put together four exercises that will help you deconstruct your process in order to figure out your baseline and lay out a plan for improvement. Finally, an important step as you engage in any process improvement initiative is to enlist the help of a third-party partner who can help you every step of the way.

Have some process improvement ideas for your legal department, but not sure where to start? Onit can help! Contact us or schedule a demo to learn more about our Smart Process Apps and App Builder platform.

Need more inspiration to start a change initiative? The Darwin quote above comes from an excellent list of quotes about change from Inc.com.

 

Rethinking BPM: Onit to Moderate a Panel Discussion at Operational Excellence Conference on March 10

Posted on March 11, 2015 by - Company News and Events

Amidst increasing workloads, decreasing budgets, and a rise in the complexity of the work, corporate law departments are struggling under the weight of this difficult set of circumstances. While enterprise software has helped manage records and tasks on the corporate level, modifying enterprise software for the way your business works today is expensive and time-consuming. So, how do you increase efficiency and productivity in a way that’s cost effective and easy to iterate to evolve with your business? Join us as we present a panel discussion entitled, “Managing Complex Operations: Filling in the Gaps to Redefine the Way You Work,” on Tuesday, March 10. The panel is part of the three-day conference, Operational Excellence in Financial Services held at the TKP New York Conference Center March 9-11.  

The panelists will include Nancy Scott, Global Head of Legal Process Excellence at AIG, An Trotter, the former Senior Director of Administration, Law Department at Viacom, and John Gilman, VP of Products at Onit. In 2014, AIG was recognized by Corporate Counsel Magazine, as Best Legal Department in part for Nancy Scott’s “prioritizing innovation and attention to process efficiency in order to save resources and survive the financial crisis.” In her tenure at Viacom, An Trotter oversaw several successful improvement initiatives, which included a rate review process and an attorney certification process. Nancy Scott and An Trotter will highlight their departments’ focus on process improvement and how Onit Apps have proven to be the right tools for improving day-to-day operations.

In this panel, moderated by Paul Zengilowski, Customer Experience Executive at Onit, we will discuss the shift in thinking around traditional BPM practices and technology and how the rise of “low-code development” has increased the ability for departments to execute on their process initiatives. An Trotter and Nancy Scott will offer first-person insights and strategies from managing their own successful departmental process initiatives.

The panel will address these highlights:

  • The importance of smaller, focused initiatives & how to justify the time and costs associated with those initiatives.
  • Why they chose to apply a BPM tool over traditional programs and solutions.
  • How they balance or rank success criteria such as operational efficiency, improved client service, cost savings or increased transparency.
  • Getting company, IT and user buy-in for process improvements.

Smart Process Apps offer a robust, yet flexible solution to fill in the gaps in your existing enterprise software. Corporations such as AIG and Viacom have deployed Onit Smart Process Apps to help tame unruly, ineffective processes and have redefined the way they manage legal department operations.

The conference, one of a series offered by the Process Excellence Network and IQPC, brings together financial industry professionals and seasoned process excellence experts to discuss current challenges and introduce innovative solutions to meet those challenges. For more information or to register, click here.

Onit to Present at the Texas Lawyer In-House Counsel Summit CLE Series

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - Company News and Events

Across law departments, workloads are increasing, and processes are becoming more complex. Texas Lawyer’s February 26 CLE program, held at the Cityplace Conference Center in Dallas, is designed to provide practical advice to in-house counsel on how to manage their increasing departmental workloads. With six sessions, ranging in topics from cyber security to contracts, this free, half-day CLE event is focused on helping in-house counsel adopt best practices in a variety of areas.

In the first session of the day, Chris Driver, Strategic Account Manager at Onit, will talk about how in-house counsel clients have redefined the way they manage their legal department operations through the use of Smart Process Apps. Driver’s presentation, entitled “Managing Legal Department Operations: Apps That Work The Way You Work,” will touch upon the differences between enterprise software and Smart Process Apps. While enterprise software helps to manage records and tasks on the corporate level, modifying enterprise software for your evolving business is expensive and time-consuming. The nimble, quick-to-deploy cousin of enterprise software is the Smart Process App. These Apps help companies manage collaborative business processes such as NDAs and contracts by filling in the gaps of existing software infrastructure.  Smart Process Apps can help tame your unruly department-level processes and help bring efficiency, transparency and risk mitigation to your everyday operations.

To register for the Texas Lawyer In-House Counsel Summit, click here.

Learn more about Onit Smart Process Apps for legal departments:

Filling in the Gaps: Adding Engagement to Your Enterprise Software

Closing the Loop in the NDA Lifecycle

Five Telltale Signs a Process is Ripe for Change

Innovate or Die: Notes from LegalTech New York 2015

Posted on February 19, 2015 by - Company News and Events

Even though the air was frigid outside, LegalTech 2015 was an excellent event filled with connections and idea-sharing in the legal technology space. Between the key themes of cybersecurity and innovation, and the many tributes to Monica Bay, retiring as editor of Law Technology News after 17 years, it was an informative and successful week in NY. This year, the conference was less about new technology and products, and more about embracing and maximizing the use of existing technology and tools. In addition to cybersecurity, the other two big buzzwords around the conference were information governance and analytics.

One of our highlights was day two’s keynote by Jeff DeGraff, innovation guru from the University of Massachusetts. This lively presentation hit upon the key theme of law firm innovation. An alternate title could have been “Innovate or Die,” to commandeer Ben Franklin’s now ubiquitous Revolutionary mantra. The pairing of “law” and “innovation” in the same sentence is an oxymoron, but it remains the most important aspect of surviving and thriving in the business of law today.  Some of our favorite quotes from DeGraff’s keynote:

“Innovation is not produced through alignment, but instead through constructive conflict.”

“Innovation requires accelerating the failure cycle…not avoiding it.”

“Learning is developmental. You’re good at something because you practice, experience and refine.”

“Innovation has a shelf life, so constant innovation is the only option.”

For a full twitter recap of Jeff DeGraff’s keynote, check out this slideshow

Here at Onit, we take constant innovation very seriously. It’s at the center of everything we do. Because businesses are constantly changing organisms, the only process management solution that works is one that is agile, adaptable over time, and responds to how people work today (not tomorrow, or yesterday). At LegalTech, we highlighted the next iteration of our suite of enterprise apps for legal. Designed to help tame the processes that bog down the legal profession, these apps are designed to help you innovate your business, one process at a time. Small changes add up to big wins, when it means that you can set your human capital loose to practice law, rather than wrestle with difficult technology. In an interview in our LegalTech Cyber Café Libby Troughton, Senior Manager, Legal Business Operations at The Home Depot, discussed a recent contract intake App deployment with Onit. The App has allowed the home improvement retailer to improve communication with clients and the speed in which contracts are completed.

Inspired by LegalTech’s rally to innovate? Onit can help. Contact us or schedule a demo of our enterprise App software.

PEX Week Recap

Posted on February 10, 2015 by - Company News and Events

This year’s PEX Week in Orlando was a great event, bringing together people from every part of the process improvement equation – from process specialists to customers, to technology professionals. The big theme for 2015 was customer experience, with a track dedicated specifically to customer-centric process improvement. The conference featured over 40 speakers, from companies from a variety of industries, including law, healthcare, non-profits, telecom, financial and transportation.

Highlights for us were case studies presented by Onit customers, Nancy Scott, and Jim McFadden from AIG. In those case studies, they discussed their respective process improvement initiatives and how Onit Apps have empowered collaboration across their various teams. In fact, AIG’s legal department was named 2014 Best Legal Department by Corporate Counsel. One of the major factors leading to AIG’s win was, according to the editor of Corporate Counsel, the “prioritization of process efficiency in order to save resources and survive the financial crisis.”

Also at the conference, Paul Zengilowski, Customer Development Executive for Onit, presented a session on how Apps are redefining the business process management landscape. An important notion in the new App-centric BPM landscape is a move away from optimization and a move towards rationalization. What this means for organizations is that meaningful change can be accomplished by changing small processes to reflect how people actually work, rather than optimizing an entire system based on how people “should” work. Zengilowski’s session highlighted how the right tools can allow knowledge workers to focus on “process results,” rather than on using difficult technology. In the presentation, Zengilowski explained that if we expect to improve the success rate and sustainability of our projects, the right tool must:

  • Offer a software experience that is as good as the software experiences they have in their personal lives.
  • Bring the work to people, instead of people having to go get/find the work.
  • Accommodate how people work.
  • Be configurable in ways that support people’s goals and accelerates their ability to do their jobs.
  • Be something people WANT to use.

Piggy-backing on AIG’s case study, Zengilowski highlighted several other companies who have integrated Onit’s App approach and are seeing much success. A global technology company has deployed the Onit NDA App to help tame a process that administers over 10,000 NDAs a year. With the company’s current process, a single NDA took 16 days. Now, with the Onit NDA App, the cycle has been reduced to less than 24 hours for 90% of NDAs, with virtually “no” lawyer involvement.

The success of this year’s PEX Week conference highlights how important process improvement is to businesses today. Here at Onit, we are excited to see where this new landscape of business process management takes us next!

Interested in learning more about the conference? Watch the PEX Week 2015 showreel.

Considering a process improvement initiative for your business in 2015? Onit can help you manage those untamed business processes. Contact us, or sign up for a demo today!

Onit to Highlight E-Billing and Matter Management Apps at LegalTech 2015

Posted on January 27, 2015 by - Company News and Events

Are you still using an enterprise e-billing solution originally implemented in the mid-1990s? You are not alone. A year after the launch of Onit’s suite of legal e-billing and matter management Apps, large companies have started to re-evaluate their technology and look to the first real innovation in the space in more than two decades.

Our suite of legal Apps enables corporate law departments and laws firms to share sensitive information (i.e., matter types, practice areas, timekeeper rates, expenses, invoices, budgets, or any document essential to their financial relationship), and companies have taken notice of the truly collaborative workspace. In the year since we launched at LegalTech 2014, our team has deployed App-based solutions for several large corporations, including The Home Depot.

The Onit team worked with The Home Depot to implement a contract intake app in a matter of weeks, in order for the home improvement retailer to:

  • Collaborate more effectively with clients, something that was made difficult with the company’s legacy system.
  • More consistently track information, addendums and attachments on new and existing contracts, where there was not a formal process previously.
  • Enable iteration over time, and the flexibility to change or enhance the process to meet evolving business needs. With their previous process, or lack thereof, changing business needs almost guaranteed ad hoc processes, which exposed the company to risk.

In a public review of their new contract intake app, Libby Troughton, Senior Manager, Legal Business Operations at The Home Depot, said:

“This has been an exceptional process improvement for our client communications, reporting metrics and speed in which we can turn around contracts. Our clients have embraced this new process and use it daily.”

Onit will be demoing its powerful apps for legal at LegalTech 2015, Feb. 3 – 6 at the Hilton New York. Visit us in the 3rd-floor promenade Cyber Café to learn more about the next frontier in legal e-billing and matter management. Alternatively, contact us to set up an appointment at the conference.

To learn more about LegalTech and to register, visit: http://www.legaltechshow.com

Four Exercises to Help You Set Change Goals for Your Organization in 2015

Posted on January 20, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

Are there changes you’d like to drive in your organization this year? Now is the perfect time to sit down and draw up a basic framework for that initiative. We’ve put together a list of questions to help you perform a basic process audit of your organizational processes. Once you go through a process audit, you’ll be able to set goals for your organization for 2015.

Before you can determine which processes your initiative will tackle, you need to understand how those processes affect the customers within and throughout your organization. Any change that improves efficiency in delivering product or services to customers will provide a return on your investment in making the change.

Exercise #1 – Which processes drive your business?

Choose three processes or workflows that drive how your organization delivers on its objectives. For our example, we’ll be looking at sales contract administration for Corporation X.

Exercise #2 – Are these processes delivering on their objectives?

To help you choose a few processes to isolate, here are some high-level questions to answer:

  • How do these workflows help or hinder the overall productivity of your team or organization?
  • Is there an inefficient, but critically important part of the process in which team members are repeatedly bogged down?
  • Do you deliver any product/service to internal or external customers without a formal process? (major red flag)
  • Are these processes hard to manage because a gap exists around them in your existing software?

Exercise #3 – What are the considerations for each process?

Now it’s time to conduct a basic process audit for each of the three you’ve identified through the preliminary questions.

Process/Workflow Name

Example: Sales Contract Administration

What is the deliverable?

Example: an executed contract for client XYZ…

Who is (are) the client(s)?

Examples: CTO at client XYZ and VP of Sales and Accountant at X Corp

What are the steps involved in completing the process?

Ex. 1. – Client XYZ is interested in purchasing goods or services, and the sales executive requests a contract to solidify the deal.
2 – Contract is drawn up at X Corp and sent to XYZ to sign.
3 – Contract is reviewed at XYZ.
4 – Edits or signed contract sent back to X Corp
5 – X Corp reviews edits and/or signs contract (steps 4 & 5 may happen more than once)
6 – Contracted executed by XYZ and X Corp and delivered to both parties
7 – Final document stored for reference
8 – Sale of widgets, or services to be rendered between X Corp and XYZ can begin.
9 – Contract must be managed for compliance, deadlines, expirations, etc.

Which roles are involved in delivering this product?

Examples: Sales at X Corp; VP Sales at X Corp; Legal team at X Corp; Admin at X Corp; Requesting Department at XYZ; CTO at XYZ; Legal team at XYZ; Admin at X Corp

How do you measure success?

Examples: number and velocity of executed contracts has a direct impact on sales revenue; client XYZ and X Corp receive a clear contract document

How successful is the current workflow?

Examples:

  • 5 clients went to competitor because they needed an executed contract in a much quicker timeframe;
  • Admins at X Corp have to do a lot of back and forth with version tracking and mistakes are often made; due to mistakes made in version tracking, several client relationships are strained;
  • The process is much more expensive from a time perspective than it needs to be;
  • Due to the added time spent by personnel, the process is more expensive than it needs to be;
  • Executed contracts cannot be located quickly and produced on the fly

Exercise #4 – How can the process be improved to deliver on objectives more successfully?

By examining each step of the process under a microscope, you can more easily see issues and identify opportunities for improvement.

Look at your process audit and determine what changes would improve it.

Examples of improvements could be:

  • Team members collaborating in real-time will reduce the potential for mistakes that happen when tracking versions of a contract in a static environment;
  • A quicker process from start to end will improve efficiency overall and lead to quicker delivery of product;
  • Transparency of process gives team members visibility into where the process is currently

In evaluating the outcome of your potential changes, make sure the answer to the following questions will be a resounding YES.

  • Will the process be quicker, therefore allowing for more efficiency?
  • Will the accuracy of the process be improved by the change?
  • Will the optimization of the process increase productivity?

Now that you’ve gone through the exercises, we hope that you are inspired to take on advocating meaningful change in your organization in 2015. Check out these additional resources on our blog:

3 Steps to Creating a Solid Foundation for Your Change Initiative

5 Telltale Signs a Process is Ripe For Change

How to Map and Organizational Process in 5 Steps

Ready to get started on your First Enterprise App? Download our whitepaper Your First Enterprise App: 6 Steps to Successfully Implement Change in Your Company.

Whistleblowing is Evolving; is Your Organization Prepared?

Posted on January 12, 2015 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management

From the continued ripple effect resulting from Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA surveillance programs, to increased reporting stemming from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, whistleblowing is a hot topic. A recent article in Corporate Counsel, Lawyers on All Sides See Whistleblowing Evolving Fast, explains the changing whistleblowing landscape. For one, the sheer number of whistleblowers has exploded. Take Dodd-Frank for example; according to a SEC report, in 2011 there were 334 tips compared with 3,620 in 2014. Secondly, the awards are getting bigger, with one recent payout amounting to an impressive $30 million. With statistics like these, companies have to be prepared.

Is your organization prepared?

Do you currently have an internal or external reporting policy or program? Even well-intentioned companies with reporting systems in place, haven’t quite found the right balance between encouraging reporting, protecting employees who come forward and protecting the company interests over time. A recent article in the Journal of Accountancy, Are Organizations Hindering Employee Whistleblowing?, discusses this phenomenon:

“Companies that maximize their employees’ willingness to report fraud in-house position themselves to learn about problems before they become bigger issues – and before employees feel the need to report them outside the organization.”

The article also references a 2009 study published in Auditing: Practice & Theory, that found that employees are more hesitant to report possible fraud to outsiders as opposed to using internal company reporting programs. In addition, employees are much more willing to report if they can do so anonymously.

Onit can help.

The Onit Whistleblower App enables you to customize an internal reporting & case management system for your organization’s needs. Using simple reporting forms, employees can anonymously report issues into a single repository, giving management visibility into potential problems that might otherwise go unnoticed or unreported. The larger benefit to the company, of course, is that by getting early insight into exposed risk, management can start internal investigations and address the issue before it becomes a much larger problem. As with other Onit solutions, the Whistleblower App allows for a collaborative workspace, enhanced visibility into cases, and supports compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.  Affordable, intuitive and easy to use, Onit’s Whistleblower App can help you effectively manage your organization’s risk and exposure in a way that encourages employee reporting in a protected environment.

Click here to learn more about our Whistleblower App. Contact us to find out how Onit Apps can help streamline any number of your business processes.